‘A message for us': Karnataka Congress president DK Shivakumar on Lok Sabha results

Karnataka deputy chief minister and the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president DK Shivakumar said that the Lok Sabha elections result in the state is a message for the Congress party. He also asserted that Congress would introspect the results, especially in Bengaluru Rural, where it lost to the BJP.

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DK Shivakumar said to the reporters, “I was expecting at least 14 seats, but we only got nine out of 25. We lost Bengaluru Rural, and it is a message for us. It is also important to observe that we got nine seats compared to one seat in the 2019 elections. We will examine all these things.”

Shivakumar also said that there is no Modi wave in this country. “BJP and its allies did not get 400. BJP could not even get 250 seats. There is no Modi wave in this country. They even lost Ayodhya,” he added.

In Bengaluru Rural, the BJP roped in former PM HD Deve Gowda’s nephew and renowned cardiologist CN Manjunath, who is also from the Vokkaliga community, to fight against DK Suresh, another Vokkaliga face. Though the Congress expected the pull in rural pockets, BJP’s CN Manjunath won with a majority of 2,69,647 votes, which is the second-highest majority among all four Bengaluru seats.

However, the BJP managed to retain most of the places in South Karnataka but failed to retain the Kalyana Karnataka region. Out of nine seats Congress won from Karnataka, five were from the Kalyana Karnataka region. Three former CMs, HD Kumaraswamy, Jagadish Shettar, and Basavaraj Bommai, representing the NDA, have won the Lok Sabha seats this time.